Omarosa Claims President Trump Suffering "Mental Decline" in New Book

The former reality television star says she was disturbed by a famous interview Trump gave to Lester Holt.

Omarosa Manigault-Newman is claiming in a new book that President Donald Trump has exhibited a "mental decline that could not be denied."

An excerpt from Manigault-Newman's new book Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House was published Thursday by theDaily Mail.

The former reality television star, who appeared on Trump's The Apprentice and later served as an assistant to the president, says she was disturbed by an infamous interview Trump gave to NBC News' Lester Holt on May 11, 2017, in which he let slip the real reason he fired former FBI director James Comey two days previously.

Manigault-Newman writes that prior to the interview, then-White House communications director Hope Hicks had briefed the president "a dozen times" that he needed to reiterate that Comey had been fired based on a recommendation from Department of Justice, a talking point that the White House and its media surrogates had spent days reinforcing.

However, in the interview, Trump contradicted the White House line and admitted he fired Comey over the Russia investigation. On May 11, Trump told Holt: "When I decided [to fire Comey], I said to myself, I said, 'You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.'"

Manigault-Newman writes that while watching the Holt interview on television, she "realized that something real and serious was going on in Donald's brain" and that his "mental decline could not be denied."

"Throughout this erratic and contradictory interview, I kept thinking, 'Oh no! Oh no! This is bad!' Donald rambled. He spoke gibberish. He contradicted himself from one sentence to the next," she writes. "Many didn't notice it as keenly as I did because I knew him way back when. They thought Trump was being Trump, off the cuff. But I knew something wasn't right."